Software products are often distributed and installed over intranet or internet nowadays. The use of software products is in general ruled and regulated by license agreements between provider and user. The provider of the software product wants the user to abide by the license agreement. This implies that the user reads and understands the license agreement for the respective software product. Hence, there is a need for a secure licensing and entitlement system to ensure that the demands of provider and user are precisely matched.
It is known in the prior art to employ software license manager tools to control software products as to their environment and runtime. License managers are also employed for product activation, trial licenses, subscription licenses, feature-based licenses, and floating licensing from the same software package.
In addition license manager tools reconcile software licenses and installed software, and include other helpful features such as device discovery, software inventory, license compliance, and reporting functions, and they increase operational transparency in order to prevent litigation costs associated with software misuse.
Nevertheless, currently the only way to ensure that the license is enforced is requiring a connection back from the user to the software product provider.
The relation between provider and user and the processes of providing products and services is usually complicated and irregular because of the high complexity and variations of the involved processes. Variations may be initiated by the software provider due to business requirements or processes in the production and interaction. For that reason most provisioning processes are highly manual and there exists no real standardization at the moment.
An example for an existing provisioning process is the App Store® by Apple® Inc. It is based on a closed model with a centralized architecture to reduce the complexity. However this approach is exclusively or at least mainly used for simplification of the provisioning to private customers where normally no high complexity is to be expected.
In JP 2010 021615 A a content distribution system and method is described for providing a license management method for a streaming content. A plurality of content distribution servers carry out streaming distribution of an enciphered scramble key used for release of scramble, while they distribute a scrambled content.
From JP 2010 218397 A an information processing apparatus and method is known for easily managing a license while reducing the load on a network by reducing the obtaining time of software.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,229,858 B1 an enterprise licensing system is provided that includes a licensing agent operable to (a) provide a customer with features and/or capacities, being allocable freely by the customer among first and second computational components; (b) receive an allocation of the first and second computational components; and (c) generate first and second licenses reflecting the first allocation.
In US 2002/0138441 A1 a technique for license management and online software license enforcement is described, wherein individual licenses are provided for regulating the use of a software product, and the software product is individualized while being downloaded from a license server. The execution of each individualized software product is monitored in agreement with the individual license terms corresponding to the individual software download.
However, in this prior art the license file is unambiguously assigned to a specific user and location. Yet, registration of every user implies a large work load and considerable security requirements on the side of the product provider. In addition, monitoring data of a huge plurality of users implies considerable traffic on the network and necessitates permanent presence of all participants on the network. Moreover, the prior art is silent on the issue of handling updates of software products.
In US 2008/0288788 A1 a digital rights management is disclosed that is based on metafiles for managing digital rights.
In general, in the prior art the computer system that wants to employ software under license must necessarily have an internet connection in order to register the software product at the provider. The license record is processed on the receiving computer system. Additional requirements may be imposed on the system from outside, e.g. the licensor, depending on the nature of the license. In summary, the involved procedures are rather complex and inconvenient to handle.
Hence, there is a need to improve the hitherto known License Management Systems so as to achieve a secure, self contained process for provision of software products to a user and to guarantee observation of license agreements at the same time.